WALES 2022
AFTER THE PROCEDURE, I was wheeled through to a recovery room, where the painkillers kicked in relatively fast. Then I was hooked up to an IV through a cannula in my forearm, and my red blood cells were pumped back into me. A small radio sat on the windowsill, blaring out upbeat indie folk. I was light-headed and a little disorientated, and the fast-paced fiddle made me feel as though my veins were being plucked like strings. A nurse brought me water in a plastic cup, and told me to buzz her if I needed anything. I was advised to rest there for an hour before the discharge nurse came to see me.
A curious mixture of emotions coursed through me. Relief that it was over. Dread at what would come next. A strange kind of elation – a likely by-product of the post-pain endorphins my body was merrily producing. Like I had fought a great foe and won.
And most potent of all: anticipation.
Were the police about to storm the building? Or had Ceri deleted my message in a spiteful instant?
And if they didn’t come … how was I going to die?
When?
Arden sat on a chair beside me, staring out of a window that looked on to the leafy suburban street.
‘What was all that about?’ I asked, once we were alone. ‘One minute you’re treating me like I’m nothing, the next you’re wiping away my tears and kissing my forehead?’
I knew as I said it that it was going to provoke a reaction. He had never treated me like I was nothing, never in all our lives. But I had to shake those emotions loose somehow, had to elicit a reaction strong enough that he might still change his mind.
‘Like you’re nothing?’ A puff of frustration as he dropped his head into his hands, and I felt the smallest pulse of satisfaction. ‘Fuck, you have no idea, do you?’
My teeth clenched so hard it made my jaw ache. ‘Enlighten me, then.’
His words were muffled as he spoke into his palms. ‘Everything I do, everything I have ever done, is to protect you. Shielding you from my emotions is to protect you, because they’re so fucking overwhelming that I can barely deal with them myself.’
‘That’s why most people do share emotions. Because they’re impossible to process alone. You’d think, after all these centuries, you’d have figured that out by –’
‘I would do anything to protect you,’ he went on, as though I hadn’t spoken. ‘And it will torture me forever to know that I can’t protect you from me . I have to cuff you to a bed, have to threaten you in a bookshop like a fucking psychopath. I have to kill you in … god, in hours. Because if I don’t –’ He curled his hand into a fist, but didn’t finish the sentence. ‘God, if I’d just said no, back in Lundenburg. If I’d just … but then there wouldn’t be us. And which is worse, really?’
My chest started to pound. Lundenburg – the London of a thousand years ago. That was where this had all begun?
When he didn’t elaborate, I tried to gently coax. ‘Arden –’
‘I have to go to the bathroom.’
He stormed out of the recovery room in search of a toilet. He must have been severely rattled by his own outburst of emotion, because he didn’t even try to tell me to stay put. Then again, the chances of me running anywhere were fairly slim – my hip, though no longer subject to the sharp, scraping pain, felt both stiff and weak.
Still, that candle of hope burned in me. Maybe this time it would be different.
I had done what I had set out to do – I had saved Gracie. But I wanted more than that.
I wanted to save myself .
I wanted to stay in this life so badly that it ached.
I wanted to watch my sister heal and grow, to see who she would become without the shackles of illness. I wanted to go on shopping trips into the city with her and Mum, where we’d toast to good health over mimosas, and they’d despair of my bizarre thrifted clothes. I wanted to take home my rare and absurd finds and run them through my beloved red Singer, to feel the shudder and give beneath my palms, to feel that bolt of pure, uncomplicated joy when I held them up to the light and saw what I’d created. I wanted the shop on the high street, the lunches with Nia, the jam-and-butter croissants at the big oak table in the farmhouse. I wanted the Welsh wilds, I wanted a home of my own, I wanted to meet my twenty-year-old self and my thirty-year-old self; I wanted to see my body wrinkle and sag. I wanted to marry, to bear children, grandchildren, the family around me so big and wild that I couldn’t cup it in my palms even if I tried.
I wanted, I wanted, I wanted .
I wanted, more than anything, the impossible thing: Arden there with me.
If only want were enough.
I leaned my head back against the headrest, sick and woozy. My eyes fluttered closed for a moment and, as they did, I heard the distant wail of a siren.
A distant siren getting closer.
As the screech got louder and louder, blue and red lights appeared over the hedge separating the hospital from the road. Two police cars turned into the car park, driving right up to the front of the building, the officers quickly clambering out.
Everything in me soared.
Ceri had done it. He had really done it.
Maybe all that want would finally amount to something.
Nonetheless, an acute sense of foreboding came over me as I heard a commotion of voices in the corridor, and several booted feet marching down the hall towards the recovery room. I was dizzy, flooded with adrenaline, half expecting Arden to dart back in there from the toilet to slit my pale throat.
I had nothing with which to defend myself.
But though my blood roared, and my guts churned, he didn’t come back.
Four police officers appeared in the doorway.
‘Ms Blythe, are you all right?’ asked the first – a spindly man with a tall forehead and a spotted chin.
I nodded numbly. I was safe. I was safe, and now four cops were here.
How could he kill me now?
A female police officer said, ‘And where is Mr Green?’
‘He said he was going to the toilet.’ My own voice seemed very far away.
‘Check them all,’ muttered the policewoman to the youngest two cops. ‘And make sure nobody gets in and out of the hospital.’
Two sets of boots clomped out of the room, and the policewoman stepped towards me. She was tall, thin and light-brown-skinned, with close-together eyes and sunken cheeks. Her black hair was pulled back in a severe bun, streaked grey at the temples.
‘Mr Hughes told us everything,’ said the policewoman. ‘About the assault in the stables, and about your reasons for doing it. I must confess, it’s a tall tale. And yet the threats from Mr Green sounded very real indeed.’
A monitor to my right made several low-pitched beeps. ‘Am I going to be arrested?’
‘Mr Hughes has no interest in pressing charges against you,’ said the policewoman. ‘We’d simply like to ask you some questions.’
‘At the police station?’ I asked.
The policewoman gestured to the IV of red blood cells and the myriad monitors and pill packets around me. ‘Given the circumstances, here is fine.’
My mind swam.
Where was Arden?
The two cops who’d been sent to find him hadn’t yet returned.
‘Thank you for cooperating, Ms Blythe,’ said the policewoman. ‘I’m DI Dehghani, and I just want you to describe what happened, in your own words.’
I swallowed hard, meeting her ferocious gaze.
And then I told her everything.
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No matter how ludicrous it sounded.
‘That’s why I fought so hard to do this procedure early,’ I finished, biting my lip. ‘I was terrified Dylan would kill me and Gracie would be left without my marrow.’
Where is he, where is he, where is he?
DI Dehghani looked thoroughly bewildered – and completely out of her depth. She looked over her shoulder as a nurse entered the room with a clipboard, then hastily exited again. ‘All right, well, we’ll need you to come down to the station for a more official conversation, but I see no immediate need to do so, given the medical circumstances. Come in tomorrow, once you’ve had the chance to seek legal representation.’
‘Legal representation? But you said yourself, Ceri has no interest in pressing charges against me for the stable incident.’
‘Believe it or not,’ replied the moustachioed officer next to her, ‘the police can press charges without the victim’s consent. And no matter what the circumstances, you still knocked someone out and tied them up in a stable with your own two hands. To that you have already confessed.’
‘Come to think of it,’ mused Dehghani, ‘I wonder if it might be best to have this Dr Chiang present too. This all seems to have been rather distressing for you, and you seem very confused about what’s going on. Psychiatric help may be required.’ She muttered this last part to the other officer, as though I couldn’t hear her.
Some dormant animal in me bucked at the idea of institutionalized psychiatry – ice picks and starched white straitjackets, pain and fear and humiliation – but I nodded in agreement, almost but not quite numb.
I was weak and exhausted, but my mind was also rattling with all manner of escape plans. If they didn’t need to speak to me in the station until tomorrow, that gave me a decent escape window.
And yet …
There was the clomp of boots in the corridor, and then the two police officers who’d been searching for Arden came back. One of them – a round, dark-skinned man with a solemn expression – made eye contact with the detective, and gave a subtle jerk of the jaw.
I took the terse head-shake to mean one thing.
Arden had escaped.